Power Game (127 page)

It is a truism worth remembering that the paramount national issues—American intervention abroad, curbing the federal deficit, strategic defenses and arms control, insuring American economic competitiveness—are not going to be settled by one president, by one round of congressional voting, or by one party. Very few purely partisan victories stand the test of time when no single party is predominant. The big issues take a prolonged effort, year in and year out, usually from one presidency to the next and beyond. And that requires some central consensus and collaboration
across party lines
. Even in eight years, Reagan could not guarantee the success of his Nicaraguan policy or the implementation of his strategic defense program, without the cooperation of his successors or a bipartisan consensus. But Reagan’s success with the 1983 bipartisan commission on Social Security offers a model for future presidents. New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo has talked of a bipartisan commission on the deficit to help the next president. On the paramount issues, such steps are necessary.

Not a Spectator Sport

In this book, my purpose is not to promote institutional remedies. We do need some reforms in campaign rules and in our governmental institutions. But tinkering with our laws and institutions will only go
so far unless voters, too, accept some responsibility for the mess they blame on politicians.

My purpose is to explain the way the power game is played so that voters can see what changes, if any, they want to bring about, not only in politicians and institutions, but in their own behavior—because the problems in our government are rooted in our behavior and in our thinking about government. We blame the politicians, but by and large politicians deliver what voters collectively show they want—either by deliberate choice, by inaction or by ambivalence. We get the kind of Congress, the kind of president, the kind of campaign system that we want.

The popular gripe about presidential campaigns, for example, is that they are too long and too boring. But these problems are direct consequences of popular pressures for more democracy and for the spread of primaries. Campaigns are long because voters in so many states want to vote in primaries. The public wanted to throw out party bosses and stop having candidates picked in smoke-filled backrooms. Smart campaigners such as Jack Kennedy, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter used that populist mood to storm the old citadels of power.

Now the 1988 presidential race has thirty-six primaries scheduled, seven more than in 1984. The money for that marathon gauntlet has to be raised by candidates well before the actual primaries begin. Once the voting starts, there is precious little time for raising money (that tripped up Gary Hart in 1984—he wasn’t organizationally ready to capitalize on his early strength). The political pros have calculated that it takes from $10 million to $20 million to make a run for the nomination in all those states (plus the party-caucus states). And to raise all that money normally requires from eighteen months to four years. By law, nominations require petitions in every primary state and fund-raising in twenty states for matching federal funds. That is slow, back-breaking organizational work. Repeaters have a head start. Reagan tried three times, in 1968, 1976, and 1980, before he made it. Mondale announced his candidacy 511 days before his party’s convention and later acknowledged that he had actually decided to run on January 21, 1981, the day after he left the vice presidency.

During the long preliminary work, most voter’s are paying little attention. The main patterns of support and public impressions are formed during the critical season from the Iowa caucuses through the cluster of primaries on Super Tuesday—one frenzied month. It may please voters to see the regional clustering of primaries, theoretically shortening the campaign, but that compressed scheduling, with candidates
darting from state to state, leaves little time for thoughtful discussion of issues. The sudden publicity earned by early victory or surprise strength bestows extraordinary advantage to the candidate who gains momentum in that period, however small the margin of victory or surprise. Actually, a slower pace of the primary season would give voters more time to gauge the candidates and to make more thoughtful choices.

Another public peeve is the enormous power of television as the medium of modern campaigns and the superficiality of televised campaigns. It is a daunting problem. Certainly, the television news industry—and political reporters in general—could do better at making campaign coverage less superficial, at more analysis, and at delving more seriously into the revealing side of candidates’ records, rather than focussing on visual fluff, gaffes, and the tactics of campaigning.

But unless the voters are prepared to give up political primaries as the main vehicle for nominating presidential candidates—and there is no sign of that—television will remain the principal medium for campaigns. In the old power game, local party leaders were important in picking the nominees; labor leaders, church leaders, business leaders, and civic leaders shared their assessments of the contenders with voters. Now voters want to make up their own minds, based on impressions from short snippets on television and from the print media. These gut impressions are light on the record and performance of candidates; more weight goes to wit, ease, and the appearance of sincerity on camera.

With primaries proliferating, campaigns are bound to remain superficial because a host of candidates want to reach a mass of voters quickly. Television is the fast mass medium, and the attention span of most voters is very short. Change will come only if voter groups find organizational ways of pressing candidates to be more substantive, or if voters turn away from candidates whose campaigns are superficial and evasive. Politicians will start being more honest and substantive when they see that honesty and substance pay with the voters.

This year, an experimental effort has been mounted to force the presidential candidates to inject more substance into their stump appearances at two early stops on the campaign trail. The nonpartisan, nonprofit Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies in Washington has spent about $1 million to give “crash courses” to thousands of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. The idea is to prep the grass-roots voters on issues such as the budget deficit, farm programs, the global spread of nuclear weapons, Central America, and international trade,
so that they can test presidential candidates with tough substantive questions, rather than let the candidates merely wheel through prepared spiels. The purpose, said Roger Molander, president of the Roosevelt Center, is to “foster a far more robust election” because people were embarrassed by the shallowness of the last two elections.

But, as I have contended, our fixation on the president is exaggerated, and it is time for more people to recognize that our elections are for an entire government, not just a president. Any president has less power than most people imagine. The capacity to form a coalition is crucial. Any Republican president faces divided government and must be able to deal well across party lines in Congress. But most voters do not stop to think that divided government is their doing, that rampant ticket splitting is likely to produce shouting deadlocks and blame-game politics between Congress and the president. It is silly to call for strong presidential leadership, to vote a split ticket, and then to blame the politicians because they could not get their act together. Split-ticket voting feeds political deadlock.

By and large, politicians represent the public pretty accurately, its views and its lack of interest in the political process. Celebrity politics, feel-good rhetoric, bumper-sticker slogans, and negative commercials reflect what the candidates and their high-priced media consultants see voters responding to. The product is geared to the marketplace and unless the customers become more discriminating, they are in for more of the same.

It is time, for example, to pay greater attention to the capacity of presidential candidates for making our government work. On this, their political past is more important than their inevitably self-serving stump rhetoric. In short, it is time to stop knocking competence and experience in government, and time to stop believing that some newcomer can transform the world inside the beltway and the world at large, with an untested magic. It is time to discount Washington bashers and visionaries, and time to value the professional politicians whose records show that they can balance the issues, sort out priorities, rally their ranks, and reach across party lines—and keep reaching across—to draw support there, too. It is certainly time to put aside the hokum that either party can rule for long without help from the other.

This means casting a skeptical eye at glamour candidates, at visions of a bright American future, and at glib promises of dazzling presidential performance. Divided government and weak parties are a fact of political life. Personality politics and communications charm are a help, but they will only go so far in coping with the nation’s most testing
problems. Whatever their philosophies, the winning candidates on both sides in 1988, and beyond, will need the craft of sensible compromise to make our government work. All three—competence, credibility, and compromise—are crucial to governing effectively.

Finally, it must be said that the policy deadlocks in Washington over spending priorities, arms control, and Central America reflect the public’s ambivalence on these issues.

The budget is symptomatic of the basic problem. People are tempted to seek solutions by imposing institutional fixes: constitutional amendments to require a balanced budget or to give the president a line-item veto. The effectiveness of a line-item veto is questionable. Governors of forty-three states have that power, seven do not, and spending levels are
lower
on average in state governments
without
line-item veto power, than in states which have it.
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A procrustean requirement for a balanced budget could in the years ahead plunge a faltering economy into depression by killing programs or forcing massive tax increases just when the economy can ill sustain such action. Almost inevitably, a balanced budget amendment would be taken to the courts for interpretation—an invitation to judicial policy-making of the broadest sort. A safer, saner route is through gradual deficit reductions sincerely backed by both president and Congress.

The real problem on the deficit, as on other central questions, is the lack of a clear public consensus—in this case, on the size and role of government. The electorate sends politicians contradictory signals: Cut the budget, but don’t cut popular programs—the ones that would have to be cut in order to cure the deficit. Opinion poll after opinion poll has shown majorities of people dislike “big government” in principle but not in practice. In the lingo of political science, such voters are “ideologically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” This basic inconsistency encourages the politics of evasion and hypocrisy in Washington. It fuels the partisan blame game.

Similarily, on American policy in Central America, the message from the voters is ambivalent—”no more Cubas” (no more Communist-ruled countries in the Americas) but “no more Vietnams” (no more American intervention and defeat). Or again, on the arms race: Be strong enough, but don’t spend too much; try to get the Russians to give up their most threatening weapons, but don’t give up our areas of advantage.

Of course, politicians who shy away from hard decisions bear responsibility for our unresolved problems. But it is not their responsibility alone. Unlike many games, the power game is not a spectator sport. It
goes without saying—yet it needs saying: In a system of direct primaries, voters must become more intelligently involved and more realistic, both about the structural problems in our system and their own role in it.

Politicians and reformers can tinker with the system, but major changes that affect both policy and the way the game is played also have to come from the grass roots beyond the beltway. When voters straddle, most politicians straddle. When the electorate does not throw its support behind a single majority party that can give clear direction to government, the government reflects that indecision in the nation. When the country lacks a consensus, the president and Congress lack a consensus. When the public has no overriding philosophy, the government lacks what Walter Lippmann called a “public philosophy.”

At this point, as the partisan combat rises again, it is well worth remembering that after the tumult is over, the nation needs a rejuvenated spirit of comity and compromise. It needs not only purposeful leadership but a realistic acceptance of the limits of power and insistence that the power game be played by the rules. No party, faction, president, or Congress can impose its will on this cumbersome, brawling five-ring political circus of ours, or ignore the rules for long—without being humbled. When the American power game was organized two centuries ago, the Founding Fathers deliberately spread the chips around so widely that no single political force could drive the others out of the game. The chips have been scattered even more widely in recent years—by reform, money, television, weak parties, and split-ticket voting—and we now need political leadership that can provide not only vision but cohesion.

From a leader, from all of us, what is required is a tolerance for the untidiness of democracy, even genuine enjoyment in democracy’s untidiness. “Speed of action,” Senator William Cohen observed near the end of the Iran-
contra
hearings, “was never the absolute goal of democracy, because a king is faster than a congressman on any given day.” Our political system needs some neatening up. The power game will never be tidy. The competition will never quit. The ruckus will never quiet. But things will work better when people are encouraged to coalesce.

In his dismay over the Iran-
contra
affair, George Shultz framed the problem and the solution with simple clarity. “We have this very difficult task,” he said, “of having a separation of powers that means we have to learn how to share power. Sharing power is harder, and we need to work at it harder than we do. But that’s the only way.”
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